AK

It's June in southeast Alaska and it's a bit of a change from dusty Wyoming. As I sit and eat breakfast I can look out the window and watch the cruise ships rolling into the harbor. Pretty soon the float planes are buzzing about and the docks are crawling with tourists despite the intermittent rain showers. I'm able to see all this because the house I'm in is on a really steep hill. It's so steep in fact, that our "street" is actually just a wooden staircase that runs several hundred feet up from the bottom of the hill to our parking lot at the top. We have intersections on this street, other similarly styled "streets" with mailboxes and trashcans and such, complete with street signs and everything. It's a bit of a departure from what I'm used to, as I said.

With the shop getting geared up for trips as well as our private areas opening up soon I've been prepping base camp, repairing gear, getting licenses sorted out, and checking out new water. Somewhere in all the chaos I've found the time to get into some coastal cutthroat and even a few gigantic sculpins. Actually they're saltwater rockfish, but they look just like monstrous sculpins if you ask me. The trout are keying up on the salmon fry that are recently hatched as well as a variety of stoneflies. The rockfish seem to be more interested in whatever furry bunny strip concoction you can put in front of them on a sinking line. Finding time is a bit of a joke around here, with somewhere around 19 hours of light to work with you can get a hell of a lot done in a day. Like fish in the rain or eat crabs. Lots of crabs.


The Cohos are staging in the creek mouths and it'll just be a few days now before the first fish make their run up into the fresh water and all hell breaks loose. Until then, I'm going to try to catch as many different species of rockers on a fly as possible. I know once the salmon really get thick I'll forget about the saltwater species for a while so now's the time. There are lots of them, so it could be interesting.